The Inner Experience of Truth
In our experience of truth, perceiving, feeling, thinking, and expressing are all parts of a lifelong process that is equivalent to inhaling and exhaling.
What Is Your Relationship with Truth
By Mark Nepo
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. ~ Aristotle
I have always felt most alive when telling the truth when the sudden utterance from within—be it a question or a feeling—rings through the entirety of me. And though I’ve been trained to focus on the objective rewards of truth, such as insight and understanding, I realize now in my sixties that it is really the experience of truth—the empowerment of the authentic—that has kept me going.
While uttering the truth or questioning the truth, electricity is turned on that connects us to that immeasurable vastness so close but always out of view. When experiencing the truth, especially the truth of feeling, I feel most like a dolphin breaking surface only to dive. The affirming thing about such moments is that they are wonderfully contagious. In a room full of skeptics, one truthful utterance can shift the entire ground of dialogue, even if no one else dares to say a word.
As a young man, I had no idea of any of this, any more than a hawk is aware of its aerodynamics. Now, I can see that this desire not to be alone in truth-seeking and truth-speaking is what made me want to be a teacher.
I really didn’t want to talk about anything outside of truth. I wanted to examine everything by sharing, reflecting, and questioning whatever I would meet through the lens of authentic feeling.
With the exception of a few friends, I couldn’t find such companionship readily in the world, and so, without realizing it, I began to write and teach in order to create a sacred place where the experience of honest truth could happen. This very quickly necessitated my introducing my students to the vastness out of view and to their own experience of authentic feeling, so we could enter this sacred place together.
I’ve also learned that each time we experience truth—each time we suffer or love—the range of our compassion widens. Like a mud-filled pipe that is hollowed out by rain to carry water underground, the force of each experience clears us out. Listening, expressing, and writing are conscious ways to clear ourselves out and to expose and extend the range of what we feel. And so, the poet or artist in us is that deep part of who we are that keeps extending the range of our compassion.
Throughout history, those afraid of the life of feelings have undermined their power and dismissed their rightful role in experiencing truth. For much of my life, I’ve been called a Romantic, which is true, but not complete. It’s like defining the sea by its surface. Romantic is a term that has been diminished over the years. Today, it denotes a sentimental outlook on life fueled by unwarranted optimism. At heart, though, it has always been an outlook that assumes there’s something larger than the individual. All the energy surrounding such a view arises from a belief in the interconnectedness of all Life and the experience of Wholeness.
At its core, Romanticism suggests that we can become whole through inwardness, by feeling and inhabiting our “inscape,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins calls it. “Feeling is all,” as the German poet Goethe says.
I would suggest that a mature Romantic is someone who accepts the hard realities of life as well as the unseen connections that knit all aspects of reality together. The great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz was, in my view, a mature Romantic. He was accurate and realistic about the terrible hardships he experienced and witnessed growing up during the Holocaust. Yet, from under all that, even in his darkest poems, there is a light emanating, informed by something larger than what any one individual can go through or bear witness to. This is what a mature Romantic commit to a devotion to the truth of living while never diminishing or giving up on the majesty of life that holds that messy turbulence of truth.
I am deeply Romantic in that I believe feelings are the threshold to Spirit. I also believe deeply in the act of expressing and how it helps us move toward being whole and complete. In our experience of truth, perceiving, feeling, thinking, and expressing are all parts of a lifelong process that is equivalent to inhaling and exhaling.
Some of us develop our abilities to feel, see, and hear more deeply than others, though I believe we are all born with the same capacities. Some of us are distracted by the noise of the world—even hypnotized by it—while some of us are tossed below the noise, hearing frequencies the rest of us have yet to access.
Consider how dogs hear well beyond the range of human hearing. In California, it’s been reported that dogs have heard the beginnings of earthquakes before seismographs could register their initial tremors. In just this way, there are those of us whose ability to feel, see, and hear is beyond our normal range of compassion. We call them empaths or psychics. And we often discredit them because what they know appears to be beyond what we can sense.
The poet in us is not only committed to the deepest form of feeling, seeing, and hearing, but also committed to learning from those who feel, see, and hear more deeply.
We are, at once, individuals and ripples in the sea that is life. And the want to know who we really are and to know the truth of our existence is, to me, the fundamental life-giving questions that the heart commits to once opened by love or suffering.
This all makes me want to share a small ritual I do every time I finish swimming. I slip into a smaller therapy pool filled with warm water, float on my back and, with my arms spread and my ears submerged so I can hear my own breathing, I softly recite this small poem of mine:
My Life
I am a fish
in search of the bottom when I surface<
in search of the surface when I bottom
and the ribbon of God’s sea
passing through my gills
is what I feel, and think,
and speak.[i]
I think the work of all poetry is to have us live on the inside of truth, so we can accept that everything is alive. The gift of all poetry is to listen to what everything has to say.
An Invitation to Explore Your Personal Relationship with Truth
~ In your journal, describe who you explore your experience of truth with. What qualities or conditions make that sacred place between you possible?
~ In conversation with a friend or loved one, tell the story of a moment in which you felt both the harshness of reality as well as the unfaltering presence of life-force below the situation. Then go back to your journal and, through metaphor or story, explore the relationship between the harshness of reality and the unfaltering presence of life-force that never goes away.
[i]“My Life…” a poem from my book of poems in progress, Pictures of the Floating World.
Excerpted from Drinking from the River of Light: A Life of Expression by Mark Nepo (Sounds True, September 2019)
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About the Author
Mark Nepo is the author of 21 books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Book of Awakening. Beloved as a poet, teacher, and storyteller, he is a long-term cancer survivor who devotes his writing and teaching to the journey of inner transformation and the life of relationship. For more information, please visit: MarkNepo.com ThreeIntentions.com
